briefly went offline yesterday for hundreds of thousands of users
worldwide after a powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)
attack hit its servers.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov later revealed that the attack was
mainly coming from the IP addresses located in China, suggesting
the Chinese government could be behind it to sabotage Hong Kong
protesters.
Since last week, millions of people in Hong Kong are fighting their
political leaders over the proposed amendments to an extradition
law that would allow a person arrested in Hong Kong to face trial
elsewhere, including in mainland China.
Many people see it as a fundamental threat to the territory’s
civic freedoms and the rule of law.
encrypted messaging service to communicate without being spied on,
organize the protest, and alert each other about activities on the
ground.
According to Telegram, the company received “GADZILLIONS of
garbage requests” which stop its servers from processing
legitimate requests, and the ‘state-actor sized’ attack has been
traced back to IP addresses in China.
“IP addresses coming mostly from China. Historically, all state
actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in
time with protests in Hong Kong (coordinated on @telegram ). This
case was not an exception,” Telegram founder Pavel Durov tweeted.
Though it is evident that a DDoS attack doesn’t have anything to
do with the security of data stored on the targeted servers;
instead, aims to take a service offline, the company still assured
the user data is safe.
However, it’s not the first time when the Telegram service was
taken forcefully down using a DDoS attack during the political
unrest to disrupt activists.
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